Design and control of a quadrocopter

With the advancement of computing and control technology, the research and development of small unmanned aircrafts became a more and more popular topic in the last decade. The goal of the thesis was the development of an autonomous four-axis helicopter. Due to the complexity of the task, the work was done by a group of students as a faculty project. During the two semesters of my thesis project, two prototypes have been realized. In this document I will outline the work I done during this project.

After the introduction, I will describe the four-axis helicopter which is a member of the group of multi-rotor aircrafts. Later I will write about the literature and market research I carried out. I will present the auxiliary parts of the helicopter which I designed and which were made with 3D-prototyping. In the following chapter I will go through the differential equations which describe the motion of the four-axis helicopter.

During the project I contributed to the design and assembly of the supporting structure for the second prototype. So in my thesis I will summarize the design steps and considerations. After this, I will describe the selection process for the motors and propellers for the second model, taking into consideration the physical properties of the supporting structure. The parameter tuning of the controller of the first model was carried out in parallel to designing the second prototype. This is described in the penultimate chapter. In closing, I will summarize the obtained results and propose further development opportunities.